All commands (14,187)

What's this?

commandlinefu.com is the place to record those command-line gems that you return to again and again. That way others can gain from your CLI wisdom and you from theirs too. All commands can be commented on, discussed and voted up or down.

Share Your Commands


Check These Out

Exit mc with 2 keystrokes
For those who like to hit instead of typing "exit" to leave the shell and find it annoying that it doesn't work in Midnight Commander, just press to switch to the subshell and now you can leave with

Convert seconds to [DD:][HH:]MM:SS
Converts any number of seconds into days, hours, minutes and seconds. sec2dhms() { declare -i SS="$1" D=$(( SS / 86400 )) H=$(( SS % 86400 / 3600 )) M=$(( SS % 3600 / 60 )) S=$(( SS % 60 )) [ "$D" -gt 0 ] && echo -n "${D}:" [ "$H" -gt 0 ] && printf "%02g:" "$H" printf "%02g:%02g\n" "$M" "$S" }

list block devices
Shows all block devices in a tree with descruptions of what they are.

Vlc ncurses mode browsing local directorys.

Which processes are listening on a specific port (e.g. port 80)
swap out "80" for your port of interest. Can use port number or named ports e.g. "http"

Find out my Linux distribution name and version

gzip over ssh
I've kept the gzip compression at a low level, but depending on the cpu power available on the source machine you may want to increase it. However, SQL compresses really well, and I found even with -1 I was able to transfer 40 MiB/s over a 100 mbps wire, which was good enough for me.

How To Get the Apache Document Root

remove repeated pairs of characters e.g. "xtxtxtxt" will become "xt"
This will remove repeated characters e.g. echo "xtxtxtxt" | sed -ru 's/(..)\1{2,}/\1/g' the output will just be "xt"

Ping a range of addresses


Stay in the loop…

Follow the Tweets.

Every new command is wrapped in a tweet and posted to Twitter. Following the stream is a great way of staying abreast of the latest commands. For the more discerning, there are Twitter accounts for commands that get a minimum of 3 and 10 votes - that way only the great commands get tweeted.

» http://twitter.com/commandlinefu
» http://twitter.com/commandlinefu3
» http://twitter.com/commandlinefu10

Subscribe to the feeds.

Use your favourite RSS aggregator to stay in touch with the latest commands. There are feeds mirroring the 3 Twitter streams as well as for virtually every other subset (users, tags, functions,…):

Subscribe to the feed for: